Brother's Fine Foods moves from basement to booming business

Oct. 31, 2013

Brother's Fine Foods products. / Submitted

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The Tennessean

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Made in Tennessee is a weekly spotlight featuring products produced in our state. Reach Jen Todd at 615-313-2760 or jtodd1@tennessean.com. For more information on Tennessee products, visit www.picktnproducts.org.

How did your company get started? Johnson: Well, (owner) Matt Harris’s father, Tommy, started making salsa and spaghetti sauce in the basement of one of his families’ houses. It’s called Brother’s because Matt’s daddy is named Tommy and there were so many Tommys, Toms and Thomases, they just started calling him Brother. They had started in the basement of one of the family’s houses and it just started getting so much more business and had more labels to add to it. Then they started in a warehouse.

Why sauces? Dillon: (Matt Harris) took a lot of his dad’s original recipes. It’s Matt’s way of taking those things and putting them out there where everyone in the community could get their hands on it.

Their medium pepper relish won an award back in 2004. That was one of the other things they started working on right after the spaghetti sauce.

Johnson: When they first got in the business, they already had a label out there. But he looked into it further and saw where the business outlet could get bigger by co-packing, which is making other people’s recipes with their labels and then selling it to them.

Where are your products available? Dillon: We have our private label sold predominately in the Marshall County area and on the Internet.

Where are they manufactured? (The warehouse.) And we’ve grown and we have a few growing pains.

How long have you been making these products? Johnson: Since 1997. That’s when they formed the business. They moved into the building back in early 2000.

What’s next for your company? Johnson: We’ve talked about in the future many new products for Brother’s label in line with barbecue sauce. We’re still working on R and D efforts there, but basically what’s next would be our co-packing.